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Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)
Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)
Posted Aug 13, 2007 3:58 UTC (Mon) by ringerc (guest, #3071)Parent article: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)
On the responsiveness issue, I've personally found it to be _different_ between Windows and Linux rather than better or worse.
On Linux I find that the same app usually takes longer to launch than on win32 - certainly for Firefox and Thunderbird. Some things definitely run faster on Windows too.
On the other hand, I've found that Windows pigs much worse than Linux under heavy CPU contention, and is much the same under heavy disk I/O contention (at pathetic). RAM exhaustion/swap thrash behaviour is terrible on both.
All in all, I think they both have some of the same basic issues - primarily insufficient attention put on ensuring that the user ALWAYS has access to a responsive troubleshooting / management interface for throttling, killing, or pausing misbehaving procesess/applications. They also both handle disk contention poorly from the user's perspective, failing to prioritize small infrequent readers & writers over bulk I/O (yes, I know this is extremely difficult to do).
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Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)
Posted Aug 17, 2007 21:56 UTC (Fri) by wblew (subscriber, #39088) [Link]
quote> RAM exhaustion/swap thrash behaviour is terrible on both.
Generally speaking, this isn't an operating system problem, its a hardware design constraint. Its all about disk access times, vs RAM access times.
When you exhaust your RAM, your access speed is at *least* 10,000 slower.
The best advice? If you are routinely exhausting your RAM, buy more RAM.